updated 11:50 am EST, Thu November 6, 2008

OCZ Solid Series SSDs

OCZ this morning has quietly launched the Solid Series, a newer low-cost alternative to normally expensive solid-state drives. The new 2.5-inch, SATA II drive uses a frugal black casing and comes in relatively small capacities but is still claimed to have performance well above that of equal-size notebook drives: reads peak at 155MB per second, while writes are quicker than Intel's mainstream drives at 90MB per second. The PC accessory maker also claims that the Solid line consumes half as much power as a rotating hard disk.

Each of the drives comes with a rare mini-USB port to let OCZ offer firmware upgrades as it discovers optimization tricks. The Solid range comes in 30GB, 60GB and 120GB capacities but hasn't yet been given pricing; it sits below the Core Series V2 in terms of performance and so should theoretically cost less than its faster predecessors.

"The Solid range comes in 30GB, 60GB and 120GB capacities but hasn't yet been given pricing; it sits below the Core Series V2 in terms of performance and so should theoretically cost less than its faster predecessors."

Right you are. I amend my criticism to say that heart of this story is buried. The lead is that there's company claiming they have a "new low-cost alternative." The heart is that the company doesn't say what that means.

If "budget" is in the story title, then the price of the product is an important detail.